YAPC::NA Day 2

Another terrific day at YAPC::NA. First up were two smashing lectures from Damian Conway, which taught me some new Perl 5 and Perl 6 tricks, and made me feel great to be a Rakudo developer. Patrick Michaud and I were both startled several times at how much he did already worked in Rakudo — to the point where when he started talking about using Perl 6 macros, I started wondering if I had somehow missed someone implementing them!

One thing we were surprised didn’t work was using .trim on a Match object. Patrick guessed that maybe Match wasn’t Cool, but Larry quickly confirmed it was supposed to be. Then Patrick and Larry brought the issue up #perl6, and we got an example of how the Rakudo team works. While we were more or less oblivious (or I was, anyway), Moritz Lenz identified the source of the bug, Carl Masak submitted it to the bug tracker, and Jonathan Worthington brought up some related issues to worry about. 80 minutes later, Moritz had submitted a patch to fix the problem and new tests for the test suite. It was a great example of how the Rakudo team works — a great example we could then share with others for the rest of the day!

(Aside: And now that I think about it, this suggests that we need a bunch more tests for Match objects, to make sure that all the Cool Str-like functions work okay on them. I’ll bet there are at least a couple more holes there.)

Grabbed a quick sushi lunch (finally! — been complaining for a week that sushi is the one thing lacking in Midland, but circumstances have been such that I kept on passing up potential chances to have some), and then sat through the lunch hour in the Parrot BOF, quietly hacking on trig tests. Then Patrick’s Rakudo Star lecture, which was satisfying but not surprising. A couple more hours hacking on trig tests (this is quickly turning into an obsession, and I really want to have it done!), the Tuesday keynote, and the lightning talks. Piers Cawley sang another song, not quite as nice as the one the day before, but this one partially original and directly referencing things Perlish and not.

At dinner I sat down with Jerry Gay and Phillip Moore, mostly because they had been with the Parrot / Rakudo crowd the night before, though I’d not talked much to either. Turned out most of the rest of the table were Bank of America Perl programmers, and we had a fine dinner and headed out to the Varsity Club after. Seemed like a lot of the conference ended out there… Jerry pointed me toward a Perl programmer who has done Perl CAD work, which I’ll have to investigate if I ever get this stupid trig work done.